Hoori

Summary

Hoori is the youngest son of Ninigi in Japanese myth and the grandfather of the first emperor. He was born with his brothers in the hall his mother Konohana-sakuya-hime set on fire to prove they were children of heaven. The Kojiki calls him Yamasachi-biko, the lad of mountain luck, because he caught the things rough of hair and soft of hair, and calls his elder brother Hoderi Umisachi-biko, the lad of sea luck, because he caught the things broad of fin and narrow of fin.

Hoori asked his brother to exchange their tools; the brother refused three times, then gave in. Hoori went fishing with his brother's hook, caught not a single fish and lost the hook in the sea. His brother said: each of us has his own luck; give me back my hook. Hoori broke his sword and made five hundred hooks from it, then a thousand, and his brother would not take them: I want my own hook. Hoori sat weeping on the shore, and Shiotsuchi, the kami of salt, came to him, made him a boat woven so close that no water could get in, pushed it off along the sea road and told him: you will see a palace built like the scales of fish, the palace of Watatsumi, kami of the sea; by its gate is a well with a cassia tree above it; sit in the tree and his daughter will see you.

When the maids of Toyotama-hime, the sea god's daughter, came to draw water, they saw a light in the well, looked up and found a beautiful young man in the tree. He asked for water, but when they handed him the vessel he did not drink: he loosened a jewel from his neck, took it in his mouth and spat it into the vessel, where it stuck fast and they could not part it. They carried it to their mistress, who went out to look, was delighted, and they exchanged glances; she told her father, who knew him for the son of heaven, seated him on eight layers of sea-animal skins and eight of silk, and gave him his daughter. He stayed three years. Then he remembered what had gone before and heaved one deep sigh, and when the sea god asked why, he told the story of the hook. The sea god gathered all the fishes, great and small, and they said the tai had been complaining of something stuck in its throat that kept it from eating; the hook was found there, washed and given to Hoori.

The sea god taught him to say, as he gave the hook to his brother, "a hook of gloom, of eagerness, of poverty, of folly", and to hand it over with his hand behind his back, and said: if your brother makes high fields, make low ones; if he makes low fields, make high ones; for I rule the water, and your brother will be poor within three years. He gave him two jewels, the tide-flowing jewel that drowns and the tide-ebbing jewel that saves. Then he gathered the wani, which most scholars now take to be sharks, and one a fathom long said it would carry him home in a day. Hoori rode on its head, reached land in a day, and tied his small knife round its neck. He did to his brother as he had been told: the brother grew poor and came to attack him, Hoori put out the tide-flowing jewel and he drowned, and when he begged for mercy Hoori put out the tide-ebbing jewel and he lived. The brother bowed and said: I will be your guard by day and night. That is why, says the Kojiki, his descendants still perform before the court the motions of a drowning man.

Then Toyotama-hime came up out of the sea to him and said: I am with child, and the child of a heavenly kami should not be born in the plain of the sea. She built a birth hall at the edge of the waves and began to thatch it with cormorant feathers, but her labour came before the roof was finished. She told her husband: whoever comes from another land gives birth in the shape of her own people; I will take my own shape to bear the child, so do not look at me. He found this strange, peeped, and saw that she had become a wani eight fathoms long, crawling and writhing, and he fled in terror. She knew he had looked, was ashamed, left her child and said: I wanted to come and go along the sea road for ever, but now that you have seen my shape I am ashamed. She closed the boundary of the sea and went down. The child was named Ugayafukiaezu, "cormorant thatch not completed". Later her longing overcame her, and she sent her younger sister Tamayori-hime to nurse him, with a song; he answered: I shall not forget, as long as I live, my sister with whom I slept on the island where the wild ducks alight. Hoori lived in the palace of Takachiho for five hundred and eighty years. His son married his aunt Tamayori-hime and had four sons, the last of them Kamu-yamato-ihare-biko, the first emperor.

The idea the story turns on is that heaven's line took in the mountain when Ninigi married the mountain kami's daughter, then took in the sea when his son married the sea kami's daughter, and came back with water in its hand: two jewels that drown and save, and knowledge of high and low fields. The younger brother overcame the elder because he now held the water that the crops need and the fisherman fears. The lost hook was the way to all of it: he lost it in the sea, went down to look for it, and found a wife and a power there. But the bond between land and sea did not last. Hoori looked at what he had been forbidden to see, as his forefather Izanagi looked at Izanami in Yomi, and his wife closed the sea road, which is why, says one Nihon shoki account, land and sea have no communication.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since neither essay reads it. The Kojiki writes it 火遠理命, Hoori-no-Mikoto. We remove the title no Mikoto, and ho, "fire", which all three brothers share: Hoderi, Hosuseri and Hoori. What remains is wori, written with the two signs 遠 wo and 理 ri. We read it from Arabic w-r-y: w is w, r is r, and the y is the final i. Lane gives "warā al-zand: the fire-stick produced its fire" and "wārāhu: he hid it, concealed it, or covered it". On this reading Hoori is a name that joins fire and hiding: born from the fire his mother lit, then hidden under the sea for three years in a palace no one reaches without being shown the way; he found the hook hidden in a fish's throat and came back with two jewels that hide the land under water and bring it out again.

Linguistic Root

The Kokugakuin database explains the three brothers' names as stages of the fire in the burning hall: the fire as it lights up, as it blazes, and as it dies down, as one Nihon shoki account has it, naming the son of the dying fire 火折, Ho-no-ori, "the fire breaking down". Some scholars hold that ho was first the ear of rice, not fire, so that the three names trace the rice ripening until its ear bends under its weight. The other name, Hohodemi, appears only at his birth, his reign and his tomb, and resembles his father's and his son's names, so it is his name in the ruling line, while Hoori is his name in the hook story. Chamberlain calls the last part of Hohodemi extremely doubtful.

Lane gives, under w-r-y: "warā, wariya and awrā, of a fire-stick: it produced its fire", "awrā, warrā and istawrā: he made his fire-stick produce fire", "wārāhu: he hid it, concealed it, or covered it", and "min warāʾ: from behind a thing covering". The sound match runs like this: the w of wori is the w of w-r-y, the r is its r, and the y is the i with which the Japanese syllable ends. All three letters stand in order with no substitution. What remains against the reading is that Old Japanese has a living verb with the same letters, wor-, "to fold, to break", from which the Japanese explanation of the fire breaking down or the bending rice ear comes.

Toyotama-hime

Her name in the Kojiki is 豊玉毘売, Toyotama-bime: toyo is an epithet of abundance, hime is princess, and tama is Japanese for jewel or spirit; the Kokugakuin database takes the jewel here as the pearls that are the sea god's treasure. We read tama, as a reading proposed on the method, from Arabic ṭamm: ṭ becomes t because Japanese has no emphatic sounds, as it does in the reading of Amaterasu from amṭara, and m is m. Lane gives "ṭamma al-māʾ: the water became abundant and rose high", "al-ṭimm: the sea, so called because it overwhelms what is in it", and "al-ṭamṭām: the middle of the sea". On this reading Toyotama is the daughter of the ṭimm, the sea that rises, and her father is the one who gave the tide-flowing jewel that floods the land. What remains against it is that tama is a living Japanese word for jewel that appears in many other names, such as her sister Tamayori-hime and Tamanoya the jewel-maker.

Key Mythic Narratives

In the Nihon shoki

The main text of the Nihon shoki makes the elder brother Ho-no-susori, not Hoderi, and tells the story with other details: Hoori forged many hooks from his sword and heaped them in a winnowing tray, and his brother said in anger: these are not my hook. The old man of the salt met him on the shore, made a basket without gaps, set him in it and sank it in the sea; he found himself on a pleasant strand and went on to the sea god's palace, with battlements and stately towers. The fish that swallowed the hook here is the "Red-woman", the tai. When Toyotama-hime gave birth she had become a dragon, and she said: had you not shamed me, I would have made sea and land communicate for ever; she wrapped the child in rushes, left him on the shore and barred the sea path. Hoori died and was buried on the summit of Mount Takaya in Hyūga.

In another account of the same book Hoori made a light with his comb to watch his wife in childbirth, as Izanagi lit a tooth of his comb to look at Izanami in Yomi, and saw an enormous wani eight fathoms long wriggling on her belly. A third account describes the defeated brother's dance: wearing only his loincloth, he smeared his palms and face with red earth and said: thus I defile my body and will be your mime for ever; then he danced the stages of his drowning: when the tide reached his feet he shuffled them, at his knees he raised his feet, at his thighs he ran in a circle, at his loins he rubbed them, at his sides he put his hands on his breast, and at his neck he threw up his hands, waving his palms.

The lost hook and the sea's daughter

The Kokugakuin database notes that the lost-hook story has sisters in Indonesia and Micronesia: a man is blamed for losing a borrowed hook, goes down into the sea, draws the hook from the throat of a fish or a girl, receives gifts, and returns to take revenge; some versions add a great fish that carries him swiftly to shore and a girl drawing water at a spring. It also notes that Hoori's marriage in the sea palace shares its source with the story of Urashima, the fisherman who married the sea god's daughter in the Man'yōshū (9.1740), and that his looking at his wife in her true shape belongs to the type of supernatural-wife tale known in Europe as the Melusine type: the man looks at what he was forbidden to see, the wife goes back to her world, and the child stays.

Symbolic Reading

The Japanese rereading essay in this project reads the myths of Japan as answers to disaster and puts the tsunami behind "the stories of drowning and rescue". The essay does not name Hoori, but the tide jewels are the clearest drowning and rescue in the Kojiki: water rises at its owner's command and drowns, then ebbs and saves, and a brother drowns and lives and becomes a guard. The Kokugakuin database records scholars' readings: Hoori's victory, as master of fields and water, over his brother of the sea pictures the passage from fishing and hunting to farming and the submission of fishing groups to the court, or the court's subjection of the Hayato of southern Kyushu, who guarded the palace and performed their dance at its festivals. And Ninigi's marriage to the mountain's daughter and Hoori's marriage to the sea's daughter give heaven's line the power of mountain and sea, the two great realms of nature, and so fit it to rule the land.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Peleus married Thetis, a goddess of the sea, who wished to make their son immortal and secretly laid him in the fire at night; Peleus saw the child writhing in the fire and cried out, and Thetis, prevented, left the child and went back to the Nereids. In both stories the wife comes from the sea, the husband sees what she is doing at the child's birth or nursing at a moment he was not meant to see, and the wife returns to the sea while the child stays with his father. They part in that Toyotama-hime herself forbade the look and what Hoori saw was her own shape, while Thetis was working immortality for her son.

His going down under the sea for what he had lost, and coming back with it and with a power he had not had, is a case of the descent to the underworld, one that succeeded where Izanagi's failed. His marriage to the sea kami's daughter, after his father's marriage to the mountain kami's daughter, is a case of the sacred marriage. The wani that carried him home are the same creatures that skinned the hare in the story of Ōkuninushi.